(January 16, 2026) – Imagine being 27, recording a song about getting old — and not seeing it chart until you’re 77.
That’s exactly what occurred this week on the Billboard Hot 100 when Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” — written by Stevie Nicks in her mid-twenties while pondering her future as a musician with bandmate Lindsey Buckingham and one of her first contributions to the Mac — made its chart debut at No. 41 thanks to its placement in the Season 5 finale of Netflix’s Stranger Things — the same episode that sent one-time Nicks collaborator Prince’s “Purple Rain” back onto the Hot 100.
And for the trivia buffs out there, Fleetwood Mac instantly becomes the only act on this week’s list that charted during both the nation’s bicentennial and its semiquincentennial. And they’ve done so with songs from the same album — their self-titled breakthrough that in 1976 set the record for the slowest climb to No. 1 from its debut in August 1975 to its crowning in September 1976.
Indeed, it was exactly 50 years ago this week when the first single from Fleetwood Mac — “Over My Head” — climbed to its No. 20 peak on the Hot 100. It was their first Top 40 hit and it featured the group’s then-longtime main vocalist Christine McVie on lead vocals.
But it was the group’s two newly acquired gems — Nicks and Buckingham — who would become their commercial anchors. The next single — the bewitching Nicks-penned tune “Rhiannon” — took the band even higher on the charts to No. 11. Third single (in America) — McVie’s “Say You Love Me“ — would match that peak.
After “Say You Love Me” ran its course, the band and their label, Warner/Reprise, were ready to move on to the next chapter — the already recorded Rumours — and within months that album’s first single, “Go Your Own Way” — Buckingham’s sharp dismissal aimed at Nicks (and on which she sang background) — was making its debut.
Meanwhile, the slowly dissolving relationship Nicks so poignantly sang about in “Landslide” became fuel for several other songs on Rumours, including her own “Dreams,” which became the group’s first No. 1 hit in 1977 and returned to the chart in October 2020 following a viral TikTok video featuring the classic.
But now it’s “Landslide” — the song that Nicks says was inspired after observing the Rocky Mountains while in Aspen, and a tune on which ex-beau Buckingham played acoustic guitar — that has endured. Never issued as a standalone commercial single during its original 1975-76 release cycle, “Landslide” was ineligible to chart per Billboard rules at the time but remained a fan favorite — one Nicks has performed in nearly every concert tour for the past half century, both with the Mac or solo. (Note: Because Billboard still required commercial single availability at the time, album cuts like “Landslide” were not allowed to chart.)
But “Landslide” has had one of the longest, strangest chart (or non-chart) journeys of any tune in Fleetwood Mac’s canon, whether by the band itself or by other acts covering it.
In 1994, the Smashing Pumpkins recorded another acoustic version that they included as the B-Side of their U.K.-released single “Disarm.” But again, because the single wasn’t available commercially in America, the Pumpkins’ “Landslide” — like the Mac’s original — never made the Hot 100. Instead, it reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart and No. 30 on Radio Songs.
A live Fleetwood Mac version of the tune made the charts (No. 51 peak) in 1998 as a commercial single release from the band’s live reunion album The Dance, ironically the last year Billboard required physical single availability in order to chart.
The next time “Landslide” charted was in a 2002 cover version by the country trio The Chicks (then known as the Dixie Chicks). It was at its No. 7 peak on the Hot 100 in March 2003 during the week group member Natalie Maines publicly criticized then-president George W. Bush for his imminent invasion of Iraq. The backlash that followed caused the song’s nosedive down the chart to No. 43 in one week and off the list entirely the next.
A version by The Glee Cast (featuring Gwyneth Paltrow) reached No. 23 on the Hot 100 in 2011, while two versions by The Voice contestants — Kat Perkins and Chloe Kohanski — charted on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs in 2014.
And now the original has finally come full circle. In what could be considered sequential perfection, it charts just months after a rerelease of the Buckingham Nicks album — the first and only one the former couple recorded before joining the Mac — prompted that LP’s chart debut and a lone week on the Billboard 200 (at No. 11) last October.
Now “Landslide” is the band’s 26th Hot 100 entry and the first since Christine McVie’s death in 2022. Incidentally, it was McVie whose final approval was needed before Nicks and Buckingham (who left for good in 2018) could join the Mac in 1975. It was McVie’s passing that, in turn, caused Nicks to declare that the band would likely never tour again.
So maybe it’s more poignant than strange that the Mac finally charts with what was arguably their most introspective song — one that Stevie Nicks wrote about life and love and growing old, and how the life she had been building at the ripe old age of 27 could all come crashing down at any time… like a landslide.
DJRob
DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff! You can follow him on Bluesky at @djrobblog.bsky.social, X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog, on Facebook or on Meta’s Threads.
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